Latin School of Chicago

LatinMagSpring15

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26 the novices can feel engaged. He also offers independent study opportunities for the truly passionate. is year, 20 students signed up for the course. ey started the year off by doing experiential hands-on work to develop a mental framework on which to build. As the class has moved on to programming, the approach has remained accessible and visual rather than getting mired in numeric and text inputs and outputs. One recent assignment was to create a drawing application that included manipulating RGB web colors, which inspired one student to translate his work into an art project that he later exhibited. In 2015-16, Wrobel will expand Computer Science Principles into a sequence of two one-semester courses, and will add courses in Web Application Development and Advanced Programming, which will continue to be offered as electives. In the middle school, Andy Stone currently teaches computer science to the fifth and eighth grades once every eight days – not an easy fit because of the already full middle school schedule. "Some of my students have no experience in computer science and no interest in learning about it," Stone said. His role, he said, is to show those students that no matter what their interest, computer science can enrich it. "I see it as an opportunity to bring kids on board who might otherwise never realize how applicable it is." His goal for the coming year, working with the new middle and lower school computer science teacher, is to find subject areas at each grade level in which an interdisciplinary approach that includes computer science learning is appropriate. By including computer science in subjects with which students are already familiar, Stone hopes to illustrate how essential an understanding of it has become to a variety of fields. In her first grade classroom, teacher Fiona Deeney regularly schedules a section called maker/innovation time. It is a period when students are encouraged to build, innovate, collaborate and problem-solve. Recently, some children were creating a track for a Sphero robot ball that they synced to an iPad app. In another part of the room, students were tinkering with circuits attached to a laptop to make music, while others were constructing a dwelling with a Goldieblox set. Without really knowing it, the first graders were learning and reinforcing the basics of computer science.

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